Samsung, Panasonic & 20th Century Fox form HDR10+ alliance

Panasonic and 20th Century Fox have joined Samsung in its plan to offer HDR10+ as a royalty-free alternative to Dolby Vision. The HDR10+ format will be made available to more manufacturers in early 2018.

HDR10+ alliance

Dolby Vision is a proprietary HDR format that offers key advantages over the base HDR10 format. HDR10+ in many ways mimics what Dolby is doing with dynamic metadata while at the same time being royalty-free. It was developed mainly by Samsung who has taken a hard stance against Dolby Vision, Dolby's HDR video format.

Panasonic and 20th Century Fox have now joined Samsung in forging an "HDR10+ partnership" to ”to create an open, royalty-free dynamic metadata platform for High Dynamic Range (HDR) through an associated certification and logo program, tentatively called HDR10+”.

This also means that the three companies are unlikely to support Dolby Vision in the near future. Samsung has already enabled HDR10+ format support via streaming in its latest TVs, but not yet via HDMI. The first Panasonic TVs with HDR10+ onboard will be showcased at IFA in Berlin later this week.

- “Panasonic has a long history of working with industry leaders to develop lasting technical formats. We are delighted to work together with 20th Century Fox and Samsung to develop a new HDR format, which will bring consumers so many benefits,” said Yuki Kusumi, Executive Officer at Panasonic. “By offering considerable HDR picture quality improvements across a wider range of TVs while accelerating the amount of premium HDR content available, we expect HDR10+ to quickly become the defacto HDR format.”

The three companies will make HDR10+ available to additional manufacturers of TVs, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, and SoC vendors starting in January 2018. It will be royalty-free but requires that manufacturers pay a “nominal administrative fee”, the alliance said.

20th Century Fox and Amazon

20th Century Fox was the only major Hollywood studio not to have committed to Dolby Vision for home releases. We now know why.

- “HDR10+ is a technological step forward that optimizes picture quality for next generation displays,” said Danny Kaye, Executive Vice President at 20th Century Fox and Managing Director of the Fox Innovation Lab. “HDR10+ provides dynamic metadata, which precisely describes every scene to deliver unprecedented picture quality. Working in partnership with Panasonic and Samsung through the Fox Innovation Lab, we are able to bring new platforms like HDR10+ to the market that more accurately realize the vision of our filmmakers beyond the theater.”

Amazon announced earlier this year that it will make its streaming content available in HDR10+ format, besides HDR10 and Dolby Vision.

- “With HDR10+ dynamic tone mapping, every scene is individually enhanced to bring to life vibrant visuals and achieve unprecedented picture quality,” the alliance said in its announcement.

The base HDR10 format is already widely deployed across studios and products. Dolby Vision is gaining support in Hollywood and is, or will be, implemented in TVs from LG, Loewe, Sony, Vizio, and others as well as some UHD Blu-ray players. With HDR10+, the alliance has some catching up to do in convincing content creators to release content in yet another HDR format.